DockerCon 2016: Weave Cloud and Weave Net 1.6

At DockerCon today we announced the public beta of Weave Cloud, a microservices console allowing developers and operations to quickly connect, visualize and monitor containers and microservices, regardless of the orchestrator. We’re also introducing Weave Net 1.6, part of Weave Cloud, which adds native Docker container network integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Docker Cloud is now in public beta — we released an early access program last year for our cloud service with a limited number of slots and have been using the feedback from that to build a service that we’re releasing today. Weave Cloud integrates the full Weave stack, including Weave Net, Scope and Flux.

Anyone can sign up using Google or GitHub credentials, or just your email address at cloud.weave.works. Weave Cloud is free during the beta period, and we’ll provide commercial pricing for the offering well before we conclude the beta and go GA.

We’re also releasing Weave Net 1.6, which natively integrates Docker containers with AWS VPC networking. This means that every container gets an IP address on the VPC network and can talk to any other container, or indeed any AWS instance. This is important to blend together containerized and uncontained application components, and it allows all the features of AWS VPC to be directly applied to containers.

A microservices console for speed

A console implies visibility and control of key capability. In the case if microservices, that means a simple, portable and resilient way to connect and manage the containers that make up microservices, bridging the gap between the orchestration platform (whether Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS or AWS ECS) and the application.

The whole point is speed, for developers, development teams, and application owners:

Improve development velocity: Weave’s simplicity and peer-to- peer network makes setting up clusters fast and hassle-free. Then, without writing a single line of code, instantly visualize apps running on your cluster so you can understand them, and debug problems before they escalate.

Quickly go from development to highly resilient production: Deploy applications anywhere from laptops through data centers to public clouds with no code changes. Weave’s unique peer-to-peer approach means no single point of failure; clusters just keep going even when there are network outages. See exactly what is happening with your application at all times, regardless of where it is running.

Scale faster: Adding or removing hosts from a cluster is a snap as Weave requires no reconfiguration. Starting and stopping containers is lightning fast due to Weave’s eventually consistent approach. And because you can visualize clusters and apps in a more intuitive way than the command line, you can head off problems before they occur using container controls built into a unified browser interface.

No assembly required: Weave Cloud is designed to work with any orchestrator and has specific support for Docker Swarm and UCP, Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS and Amazon Web Services EC2 Container Service (ECS).